Spotlight: How National Institutes of Health Advances Genomic Research with Big Data

This week, I’d like to shine a spotlight on innovative work the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is working on, leveraging Big Data, in the area of genomic research. Understanding DNA structure and functions is a very data-intensive, complex, and expensive undertaking. Apache Hadoop is making it more affordable and feasible to process, store, and analyze this data, and the NIH is embracing the technology for this reason. In fact, it has initiated a Big Data center of excellence — which it calls Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) — to accelerate innovations in bioinformatics using Big Data, which will ultimately help us better understand and control various diseases and disorders.